


Not Death, but Stranger

by broguebingo (adazzledim)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Academia, Metafiction, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:53:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21543310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adazzledim/pseuds/broguebingo
Summary: Excerpt from the translator’s notes,Ice and fire, godswood and sept: collected Westerosi myths and legends, Fintan Rivers and Meena Fardyk (New Cailin University Press, 1283) pp. xiv-xx.
Kudos: 7





	Not Death, but Stranger

Excerpt from the translator’s notes, _Ice and fire, godswood and sept: collected Westerosi myths and legends_ , Fintan Rivers and Meena Fardyk (New Cailin University Press, 1283) pp. xiv-xx.

... The seventh is the hardest to translate precisely, though; while the other six all have relatively clear-cut equivalents in our own language and cultural lexicon, the name of the seventh, and traditionally, final, of old Westeros' ‘new’ gods largely evades exact understanding. _Death_ is a possibility, certainly: written and oral history indicate that dying and the afterlife fell under the god’s purview, and the verb for death, in middle Westerosi at least, shares some etymological ties with the word most commonly used in writings of the time for the god in question. What we know of Westerosi cultural narratives surrounding death and dying complicates the matter, however; so thoroughly tied up were they with those surrounding the unknown or unfamiliar, and fear or embrace thereof, that short of travelling eleven hundred years back in time and visiting a middle Westerosi sept or feasting-hall, we have no way of knowing the degree to which they may or may not have even been discrete concepts. After all, it is the language of that time that gives us the expression 'to be dead to someone', in the sense of estrangement or unfamiliarity, and in certain (mainly Northern) dialects, the forms of address used to speak of the dead and of or to strangers were all but identical. Thus, many modern translations of myths and legends from the post-second conquest period elect to use _stranger_ as the name of the seventh new god, and, lacking an equivalent both more exact and as concise, this edition will follow suit. 

(It must then be noted that despite debate in certain circles, the steed of Sandor Clegane, as it appears in _Black Hound and Little Wolf_ [p.195], is here named not Death, but Stranger; though considering the tragic hero's fate later in the saga, this ambiguity may be a touch of symbolic foreshadowing added in later, narrativised retellings - most notably, in _River's Run_ , one of the less well-known Tarlean historical plays, whose author and audience would have had sufficient historical and linguistic proximity for the wordplay to be both possible and appreciated - and have no basis in any of the real historical persons or events from which the tale borrows.) ...

**Author's Note:**

> i dont know a single thing about referencing, which is probably not good considering im at university rn


End file.
